Sunday, February 24, 2013

Loving the Holy God: Something to Ponder

If agreement with the world is being hostile toward God, and the world cannot receive Jesus, the real one, because of its sin, then it must be, as the Scripture indicates, that loving the true God and Jesus Christ who He has sent is a supernatural work that is done within the man who is regenerated.

But what that implies, of course, in light of what we have been talking about concerning God's wrath and violence toward wicked men, is that the true God and Jesus Christ, as they are revealed in Scripture, are unacceptable to the unregenerate man.

But many work hard to make our unacceptable God acceptable to all, even to those who are unregenerate and false believers. This cannot be accomplished without simply arguing for the existence of another God and another Jesus who is not the true God and Jesus Christ who are revealed in the Bible.

As Edwards once argued, it is loving God for His holiness that is completely unacceptable to the unregenerate man. He can love God for His love, for His grace, for His mercy, but not for His holiness and violent justice upon agents of evil if, as the Bible teaches, he, or someone he loves, is one of those agents of evil. Seeing God's holiness makes the unregenerate man despise the true God and Jesus Christ. He does not want to hear about this God of justice, who wipes out whole peoples for their sin and sends to hell the devil and his angels, together with all who follow their chaotic paths. He wants to hear about the accommodating God, the God who has mercy apart from any repentance or adoption of holiness by those men upon whom He has mercy, the God who does not judge or let anyone be judged for his murderous practices that divorce himself and others from the true God and His Christ.

What are we to conclude, then, but that all who argue for such an unholy God, who is not the God of the Bible who destroys the wicked in such a way, and is unforgiving toward unrepentant agents of chaos, but that they are unregenerate men, who do not love God because they have not been born of God. They love a god of their own liking, but not the Holy One of Israel, who is praised and exalted by His people for destroying their enemies, not condemned as a false god and evil father for preserving His children in holiness through the means of removing tempters and stumbling blocks, who are no more than vehicles of corruption and the would-be ultimate destruction of the people of God.

Saying one loves God is irrelevant, therefore, as one must define what he means by love and what God it is that he loves. If he loves God, he will agree with God's commandments and see God as beautiful in ALL of them. But if his declaration is of another god, he will despise the God of Israel, YHWH, the Father and the Son as He is revealed in Scripture by the Spirit, and testify that all should exalt and worship another god instead, one more palatable to all men, regenerate or not.

So this is no internal debate. What I've said above shows this to be a matter concerning the apostasy of worshiping another God, a heresy born in a pluralistic and polytheistic society, where terms are confused so that we might think that we are closer than we are. Such is a false unity and a deception that seeks to subtly creep in by using the language of the Bible in order to undermine, and ultimately replace, the God and Jesus of the Bible. And, as John tells us, this is the spirit of antichrist, which rejects the Father and the Son. And as such, this is no love of the true God at all.

No comments:

Post a Comment

My Books

About Me

I am a perpetual student of the Bible. I hold a B.A. in Biblical Theology from Moody Bible Institute, an M.A. in Old Testament and Semitic Languages from Trinity Evangelical Divinity School, where I also received Candidacy for an M.A. in New Testament, as well as achieving Candidacy for the ThM in New Testament at Westminster Theological Seminary. I have a wife and nine children who I love beyond measure; and am committed to Christ through what has been historically maintained as orthodox Christianity.